


the undone and the divine

by thedivinemove



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Apocalypse
Genre: Antichrist, Apocalypse, Biblical References, Blood Magic, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, Demonic Possession, F/M, Religion, Witchcraft, post 8x05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-08-02 16:13:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16308476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedivinemove/pseuds/thedivinemove
Summary: He hates her, deeply, ferociously, and that is a pleasant feeling, building up hot inside him. She walks across the room, fingers grazing the white-light walls of his prison. His own follow hers on the other side, but he can’t touch her, can’t dig his nails into her skin. It drives him mad, this need to rip her apart with his bare hands and sink his teeth into that smooth, pale flesh. His palms are still scarred from when she branded him; he wants to brand her in turn.





	the undone and the divine

He waits for their next move with a serene smile on his face. He knows he can take them on – all of them; Cordelia might prove challenging, but his power is so much greater. His victory assured. Darkness is already gnawing at the earth, already devouring it, turning it into ash. They’re too late.

So he watches as they gather at the bottom of the stairs; four witch bitches, their eyes hard and focused – even _Coco_ , the biggest joke of all, with that pitiful wisp of magic in her blood.

Michael laughs. He can’t help himself.

He takes a step down. The witches stand still, barring his passage, magic coming off them like ocean waves before a storm – gentle, but still threatening, far from reaching its true potential. It’s fine, he thinks, one foot suspended in the air, he can pass over their corpses just as well.

“Careful,” the old bat says, the candlelight shining off her glasses, “it’s a long way down, boy”.

Oh, he knows all about the descent. And soon, they will, too.

He raises his arms.

Then, the world _shifts_.

It’s a peculiar feeling, one that makes his hair stand on ends, makes his teeth grind painfully. Nothing visibly changes, and for an excruciating moment he can’t figure it out – until his eyes lock on the candles. Rapidly growing, burning candles.

The witches stand unmoving, unrattled, which is bad in itself, because he’s the only one left in the dark, and the self-satisfied smirk on Madison’s face makes him pause. Four witches. No Dinah. No… Mallory.

He runs down the stairs and lets out a blast of power – brutish and unsophisticated, but it’s enough to get them out of his way, sends them flying like puppets through the air. He rushes to the library, and there are bodies on the floor, masquerade-clad and repulsive, unmoving, but then in a blink of an eye, like clockwork, writhing on the floor and choking, then standing up, holding untouched poisoned apples to their mouths.

No witches there.

He feels for the power, tries to sense its location, but Cordelia’s magic is cloaking his senses. The music and the voices turn into a hellish cacophony as time more and more rapidly folds in on itself. He moves like a ghost between them, silent and unnoticed, until he throws open the doors and steps outside into the heart of nuclear winter.

There is a figure on the ground, a dot of grey in the swirling mist. Michael’s lungs seem to fill with sand. His fury rises, red and boiling and monstrous, as he closes in on her kneeling form, notices her palms pressed into the earth, as a sea of power continuously pours out of her into the ashy soil.

He hits her with all he has, all he is, which is enough to annihilate any living cell as far as the eye can reach. But as the hellfire recedes, revealing only scorched, smoking earth, he sees that she is still there, still breathing. There’s blood dripping from her nose, falling to the ground between her shaking hands.

It can’t possibly be real.

Michael lunges, ripping her hands off the surface, and shoving her backwards until she lies spread on the ground. He pushes his weight on top of her, legs pressing down hard to stop her kicking, and he’s seething; if his magic won’t work, he will choke the life out of that deceitful bitch with his own hands; all that time hiding under his nose, with all that fucking magic cloaked and hidden, and her fucking mousy face all confused and playing _him_ —

He wraps his fingers around her neck and squeezes hard, hungry for that sweet snap of breaking bones. Waiting to see her eyes roll lifelessly into the back of her head. He isn’t prepared to see Mallory’s face – paper-white and blood-stained – start to glow.

The glow spreads over her whole body, at first soft, then rapidly growing in intensity. His hands wrapped around her neck start to burn, and the pain is bone-deep, like he’s never felt before. He tears himself away, falling to the ground, away from the pulsing light. Once he’s away, she dims, her heavy breathing pounding in his ears like cannons.

He looks down at the scorched meat that used to be his palms. He wills himself to heal, focusing through the pain and anger.

Nothing happens.

He can see his actual bones move as he attempts to flex his hand.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she says hoarsely, sitting up, her smooth, perfect hand wiping the blood off her face.

Michael lunges at her again, but the glow rises faster than a scream, and sends him flying, bones rattling and agony piercing every sliver of his being.

“Stay away from me,” he hears her yell, but he can’t see though his burning eyes, burning like acid deep into his skull; he tries to claw them out but his hands are useless, and the pain only gets worse.

He feels the world shift again beneath him, as time passes, backwards, all the way to the footsteps and cars and the bombs and the chirping of birds and Mallory collapsing to the ground – out of breath, out of fight.

He opens his eyes and sees her, stretched a few feet away from him. Her hair obscuring half of her face, the other half smeared with sticky blood. _This isn’t over_ , he thinks, putting all his power and conviction into these words so they resound in her mind. Her eyes flutter open in shock, and he lets her see his true face for a split second before he gathers the last of his strength and disappears.

 

.

 

Back at the Academy life moves on; they pick up the pieces and start anew after the apocalypse that’s never been. It doesn’t mean peace, it doesn’t mean salvation. They may have stopped the bombs, but the world continues to veer over the edge.

Mallory struggles to remember. The identity spell doesn’t completely let go of her, which she tries to conceal from the others with varied success. It feels like she’s made out of three different Mallorys and the pieces don’t fit together. There’s Mallory, the witch from before – talented and soft and loved, the unhappy, discarded Mallory of the Outpost, and the Mallory of _that day_. The one who’s done the unspeakable.

She feels soiled, dirty. She scrubs her neck countless times, but it still tingles with his touch.

 

.

 

Michael Langdon’s words still ring in the back of her mind. _This isn’t over_ ; he did not lie.

The possessions start imperceptibly – few here, few there. They happen all over the country in small numbers, and are easy to exorcise. But then he grows greedy. Takes schools. Churches. Supermarkets. Skyscrapers. There aren’t enough witches and priests to contain them and when he lets demons run free in the streets, Mallory is left no choice.

“How do you like my army?” he yells at Cordelia, when the witches face him in the carnage. He stands amidst the monsters and destruction, looking like an angel, smiling like a devil. His hair encircles his head like a golden halo, and Mallory thinks it’s a cruel, cruel joke the universe is playing on her, to set him, _it_ , on her path.

His blue eyes burn ferociously as she steps towards him, the smell of death biting in her nostrils.

“Little girl, I will tear you apart,” he croons in a language only she can understand. The banishment words are stuck in her throat as she’s once again left staring at an empty space.

 

.

 

“You should have killed him when you had the chance,” Madison says, putting into words what everyone has been thinking. They huff and scold her, but Mallory sees the truth behind their eyes. Michael continues his work of destruction, slowly, meticulously sets the world on fire. _Again_.

Why can’t she do it? She has the power for it, right there, in her very hands.

 

.

 

She’s wearing flowers in her hair. It’s amazing, he muses, how completely different she looks with her hair down. It’s light and silky, like spun gold, framing her face, softening her edges. She wears a crown of roses on her head, a flowing witch-black dress and thin strappy sandals. He folds himself next to her on the bench – close enough to smell her sweet, rotting scent – and sees her stiffen at his presence.

She closes the book she’s been reading, and turns her sweet, sweet face towards him. The park is crowded, full of families with children running around. One false move from her and a flick of his finger could make it all turn into a wasteland. She’s smart; she knows it.

Michael stretches his legs in front of him, reaches his arm over the back of the bench, just so his fingers brush her hair.

“Are you going to burn me again?” he asks absentmindedly, finger dipping experimentally to her nape. He withdraws, and looks back at his finger. Whole. Curious.

Mallory swallows, her throat working deliciously, as she looks from his hands back to his eyes. She’s fierce – or tries to be, at least – he finds it hard to take the threat seriously when she looks like a weak little flower, ready to be stomped by his boots.   

“I can’t let you do this anymore,” she says, shaking her head. He sees now, some of the roses in her hair still have thorns.

He licks his lips. “I’m not doing anything, sweetheart.”

“You’re bringing on the plague.”

He laughs and leans closer, the scent of her filling his nostrils, making him want to gag. “All I’m doing is pointing out to the good American people that they’ve been putting poison into their children.”

“You’re bringing on the plague,” she repeats slowly, distinctly, her eyes blazing.

“It’s their choice not to vaccinate.” He shrugs, all innocence and sharp teeth.

“You’re despicable.”

He presses his thumb to her lips, traces their soft outline and smudges her lipstick. “And you, my dear,” he digs the nail into her skin, “are weak.”

She moves away, but not fast enough to stop him from drawing blood. It bubbles on her lower lip, and the sudden urge to lick it off disturbs him like nothing else.

“You have one last chance to stop,” she says, “I won’t allow it again.”

He leans back lazily. “You know I will never stop. This is who I am. What I’m here for. And you’ll never stop me – not now, not in a hundred years.”

Mallory’s lips curve into a snarl, but all it does is make her look like a displeased little girl. “You don’t know anything.”

“I know more than enough. You see – the only way you could ever stop me is to kill me. But you can’t do that, can you?”

“One last chance.”

He clears his face of all kindness, eyes setting to stone. He whispers venomously, “I kindly decline.”

Mallory sighs. Closes her eyes. And then brightness swallows them whole.

 

.

 

She locks him in a cage.

She puts him to sleep and then pours all of her magic and not-magic into building the walls of his confinement; not a single crack, not a single break in the spell is allowed. It will contain him, for a while, and as long as she stays close, feeding the walls their due.

Her feat impresses no one.

“So I now have the Antichrist in my basement,” Cordelia says in that soft, resigned voice of hers that never fails to make Mallory guilty. The proximity upsets Misty, and when the other witch is concerned, Cordelia doesn’t make allowances. He will have to be disposed of. Soon. And forever.

“Fiona would have an apoplexy,” quips Zoe, but even she doesn’t dare venture anywhere near the stairs down.

“Mal, my darling, we all know about your good and kind heart,” Myrtle says placatingly, as if she were talking to a child; behind her Madison is making a dramatic show of fake-gagging, “but he does not deserve your mercy, child. He’s the literal devil. You’ve seen what he has done. And—getting rid of him wouldn’t be the same as killing someone, really. You would be sending him back where he belongs. He will probably be happier in hell, anyway.”

Madison looks doubtful, but something changes in her eyes when she turns back to Mallory. Because Mallory pretends what Myrtle said is true, that she’s still the same girl who turned flowers to butterflies, and never could hurt a living thing. And Madison seems to sense it’s a lie. That deep inside Mallory something is rotting, and her real fear has taken shape.

And it’s not killing Michael Langdon.

It’s what comes after.

 

.

 

He is going to _kill her_.

He will tear her to pieces, splitting her into tiny little fragments for all eternity until she’s _dust_ , and he will not stop, never stop until that fucking bitch gets what she deserves.

He’s locked in his human body, blind and unmoving, contained in a cage made out of her mold-smelling magic that sucks every bit of his power like a sponge. His only entertainment are his fantasies of elaborate torture and murder, but even that gets repetitive after a while. He never thought that this could happen to _him_ , of all people.

Ages later, he finally senses her on the other side of the wall.

Somehow, he manages to open his eyes.

“Let me out.”

She walks up to him, a tiara of laurels on her head, and lips curving in an unfamiliar way that makes her look a little sharp, a little vicious. “Didn’t you say that all you want from this world is for people to stop playing games and be themselves? Well, here’s your chance. No one else to be but yourself.”

His limbs come back to him and he picks himself up from the floor. He hates her, deeply, ferociously, and that is a pleasant feeling, building up hot inside him. She walks across the room, fingers grazing the white-light walls of his prison. His own follow hers on the other side, but he can’t touch her, can’t dig his nails into her skin. It drives him mad, this need to rip her apart with his bare hands and sink his teeth into that smooth, pale flesh. His palms are still scarred from when she branded him; he wants to brand her in turn.

 

.

 

At night, she dreams about him.

She doesn’t know if it’s his magic somehow escaping his confinement, or if it is her own mind playing tricks on her, but he’s there, always there, over her, with his death smell and red-rimmed eyes, the rough, uneven skin of his palms moving down her thighs.

“Kill me,” he says – a prayer, a dare – licking a hot, wet stripe between her breasts, fingers biting into the skin of her thigh.

“I can’t,” she sighs, curling her hands into his hair, guiding him to her breast.

“Kill me,” he whispers against her skin, and then bites down, hard. Her world shatters.

“I can’t,” she thrashes against him, but he holds her down with his weight, like he had months ago at the end of the world.

He wraps his hands around her throat. “What are you afraid of?”

“I can’t,” she repeats, and wakes up.

 

.

 

They know her magic is not right. Or, more accurately, it’s not magic at all.

Cordelia is not fading. And Mallory’s purifying light has never been a spell.

She has memories from her past life, of playing by the water, throwing a ball far into the sea. She remembers running after it until her feet started to sink into the wet sand. She couldn’t swim. She took a step, and another, balancing on the surface as if it were solid and even, until her family on the beach were nothing more than tiny specks of bright color.

“So she can levitate,” her mother said quietly, fearfully, when she thought Mallory couldn’t hear.

“That wasn’t levitation, dear,” her grandmother said.

 

.

 

“I know what you’re afraid of,” he says, eyes shining behind the bars. She continues to ignore him, tracing the tips of her fingers along the walls, feeding them more and more each day. Michael walks up to her until he’s a breath away from the white light; it burns just like her touch, he’s tried that, got a nice scorched finger for his effort. “You don’t have to be, you know.”

She raises her eyebrows at him. “What makes you say that?”

“You and I are the same – I can feel it,” he says and it sends a chill down her spine. They are something, both made out of stuff that isn’t of this world. “So we belong together.”

Mallory lets out a laugh; a sharp, foreign sound, that still doesn’t seem to shake him. “We could run away together," he says, voice honey-sweet and seductive as sin can be, "I’ll promise to be good, you’ll have your birds and plants to play with—”

She laughs and laughs, and it can’t seem to stop, it will never stop, until wracking sobs start to shake her form. Pearly red tears fall from her eyes.

She pushes her hand through the light and wraps her fingers around his wrist like claws, nails digging into his skin. “You are the _reason_ I’m here. There will come a day when my purpose is fulfilled and you’ll go back to the deepest pit of hell where you belong. Don’t, even for a second, doubt that I will kill you. And it won’t be long now.”

“You won’t,” he purrs, taking a step back, trying to coax her inside, “you like feeling powerful, you like having me here, locked up and chained like a pet, you like having me in your bed—”

Still holding his wrist, she pulls herself backwards and shoves him into the light. Michael roars, the angelic fire eating up his arm and face, leaving mangled, charred flesh in its wake.

 

.

 

“Dying sucks,” Madison says, passing the bottle of gin to Mallory and lighting a cigarette with a snap of her fingers.

Mallory’s hand closes around the bottle neck, and she takes a sip. It burns so good, warmth spreading through her body like liquid fire. She will miss this – if she’s still capable of the feeling, wherever she goes next; if she still has her memories. If she’s anything at all, after her deed is done. “I know,” she sighs.

Madison snorts. “No, you don’t. You haven’t died for real.”

 _Yet_.

They sit on the roof, drinking in silence, the airplane lights blinking at them tauntingly, a mockery of the stars.   

“I’ve stayed too long, haven’t I,” Mallory muses. There’s nothing left to do. Nothing left to live for.

“I don’t know. Somehow the world is still turning, even with that fucker breathing in the basement. But," she waves the cigarette in front of Mallory's face, "you have to finally deal with that. I know the others are losing their shit.”

“I just—I really don’t want to do this.” _I’m not ready to go._

“Tough luck, bitch,” Madison says harshly, but there is something wistful in her eyes that she tries to blink back, “that’s life for you.”

 

.

 

She steps inside his cage and he wastes no time to pounce on her, knee digging into her stomach and hands biting into her neck. She’s not burning him, and that agitates him suddenly, fingers moving to the lace of her white dress.

“What is it?” he asks, and there is little breath left in his lungs when she flips them over and climbs onto his body. She hovers above him, her hair falling over them like a veil, and when he combs his fingers through it, her thorny headpiece draws his blood.

She presses her lips to his, softly, sweetly, ignoring the vicious way his arm around her waist presses her into his hardness, or the way he tugs at her hair. She kisses him again, and again, avoiding his sharp teeth, breathes in his grave smell, and pushes a knife into his chest, deep, deeper, dead. Blood bubbles between their lips, and she says, “let's go home”.


End file.
